The impact of the doctorate on the mental health of researchers

Autumn has begun, as you know, with the sky breaking over us as in the worst nightmares of a Gallic village. For a DANA to occur, there must be a mixture of warm sea and cold air at altitude, which is not strange at this time of the year. But that the sea is warmer than before we all know, as reported by the scientific records and it is rejected by denialists who also believe that neither sexism nor feminism exists and that their grandfather smoked and lived to be 90. The solution, I fear, is not near: my youngest son when he was 2 years old also said that two plus two was five and I couldn't convince him otherwise, but the difference is that he has grown up over time and the others, over time, have increased.

The fact is that the adverse weather encouraged me to do that very autumnal thing of sofa, blanket and movie mainstream. The chosen one was The Love Hypothesis, in which the protagonist combines her PhD at Stanford with falling for a scientist with marble-chiseled pectorals, endless workdays, and cruel researchers who harass her and steal her experiments. That doing a PhD involves many hours, meager salaries, and rather non-existent recognition is no secret, because the research career can be called science, but also modern slavery. Not in vain, a study in more than 20,000 Swedish doctoral students published in 2025 showed that the use of psychiatric medication increased progressively after the start of the doctorate, and reached 40% more in the fifth year compared to the levels prior to the doctorate.

Facing this discouraging landscape, an optimist would argue that beautiful things also emerge from science. Some examples: an essay published in Science argued that long hours in the laboratory create many moments at the coffee machine, which are beneficial because they bring ideas, resources, and companionship in the face of shared frustration. There is also the case of David Tamayo, a Basque PhD student who went viral in 2016 because in the acknowledgments of an article about mussels, he proposed to his girlfriend (I have been confirmed that yes, they are still together and have two children). Or the selection of scientific images that the magazine Nature makes at the end of each year and which in 2025 included spectacular photos of frogs fighting and spiders mating. Without forgetting the periodic table, which shows that everything we are and everything that surrounds us shares fundamental principles. This reminded me of a very poetic table I saw at the Planetarium of Pamplona, where oxygen was defined as "indispensable for life, it leaves with every sigh." Just like the mental health of a PhD student.